More Than Eyebrow Raising!

Having already taken a jab at governance earlier this morning, I feel a bit cautious when it involves going further out on that limb. Nevertheless, prevailing conditions are such that I find it difficult to ignore them. By way of disclaimer, I should let readers know that, when I read the news every morning, one of my primary feeds comes from the Al Jazeera Web site. I was not surprised that my cable service did not provide me with a channel for this television network. However, that service offers an abundance of “Apps,” one of which happens to be YouTube; and YouTube has no trouble directing me to a livestream from Al Jazeera English.

When I began writing this, my first source was an Al Jazeera’s Web page. It presented a video approximately twenty minutes in duration about Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The final sentence of the text summary describes Hegseth’s professional efforts as “part of a long-running mission to end diversity measures and push forward a Christian nationalist agenda in the US armed forces.”

As an atheist, this disturbs me. Mind you, I have only been an atheist for about the last 40 years, roughly half of my life. Before that, I was Jewish, which is probably just as well, since the only job I could land after completing my doctoral degree was at the Technion in Israel! I lasted about two years, after which I moved on to teach computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. However, it was after I moved over to the private sector to work at Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that I first acknowledged my commitment to atheism!

It is that commitment that rubs even the least suggestion of “a Christian nationalist agenda” the wrong way. As a secondary student, I was taught to appreciate the virtues of the “melting pot” metaphor for the United States. To be fair, however, it has been decades since I have encountered that epithet. So I would not be surprised if Secretary Hegseth was not familiar with it!

Of course, things were not going that all smoothly when I completed my doctoral studies in 1967. Many of my friends talked about leaving the country, and some of them actually did! As I observed, I ended up being one of them. In retrospect I would say that the Technion helped me cultivate my teaching skills, which I could deploy with greater confidence when I took my first job in the United States.

Police and emergency services deployed after today’s attack in Manchester, England (photograph by Peter Byrne of the Press Association, provided by Associated Press, included in the New York Times account of the event)

Ironically, as I am writing this, BBC News is broadcasting an account of an attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. The entire half-hour was focused only on that city. My guess is that, as I am writing this, the White House staff is scrambling to put together a response by our President. Ironically, our Federal government is in the midst of a shutdown, leading me wonder whether there is much that the Executive branch (or, for that matter, the Legislative one) can do, or even say, that would be productive.

Having now gotten this state of affairs off my chest, I must remind myself that my skillset for dealing with such affairs is sparse unto an extreme. I am at my most productive when I focus on writing about music. Regardless of how things currently are, I should sign off on other speculations!

Why They Still Hate Us

Today's Al Jazeera Web site has a Talk to Al Jazeera article that is positively cringe-inducing, if not worse. It amounts to a transcript of an interview with Secretary of State John Kerrry and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. The ostensible topic concerned current conditions in Syria and the impact of ISIL. However, as the old cliché goes, context is everything. In this case the context was defined by the seventh Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which was recently held in Silicon Valley and included a visit by President Barack Obama almost exactly a week ago.

The interview quickly devolved into a sort of cheer-leading session around the premise that entrepreneurship was the key to solving all of Syria's problems, as well as the threats of expansion by ISIL. Here we had two men with pasts rich in the domain of foreign relations; and the only message that seemed to matter was that what was good for business would naturally be good for Syria and the well-being of the Middle East. Back when posts occurred more regularly on this site, one of those posts included the phrase "innovation propaganda" in its title. Back then Jonestown Kool-Aid was one of my favorite metaphors. I knew that we have yet to get over that poison, but I had not anticipated that anyone with the serious responsibilities of Secretary of State would be drinking the stuff.

Another favorite trope from the past on this site was Max Weber's proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. When our country has lost the capacity to establish a dispassionately clear-eyed view of what is going on in the rest of the world, particularly when it involves violent hostilities and refugees, that should be taken as a sure sign that not only has meaning been lost but it is not even missed. Is it any wonder then that so much of the rest of the world now views us with suspicion, if not fear and loathing?

Trump's Damage has Already been Done

It would appear that, regardless of whether Donald Trump becomes the Republican candidate for President next year, his divisive rhetoric has taken hold of the general population of the United States in more ways than we might imagine. His latest victim is Riverheads High School in Augusta County in the state of Virgina, a state that tends to be sympathetic to Republicans and seems to translating that sympathy into enthusiasm for Trump. Riverheads' mistake was to encourage an appreciation of cultural differences by exploring the role of calligraphy in sacred Islamic texts. This included an assignment to reproduce the calligraphy of the Islamic declaration of faith, known as the Shahada.

Copying is often a valuable pedagogical tool. An excellent example can be found in Bernard Greenhouse's description of his cello lessons with Pablo Casals, which began with a prolonged exercise during which Casals instructed Greenhouse to produce "an absolute copy" of his way of performing Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 1008 solo cello suite in D minor. Similarly, there used to be a counterpoint teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music whose only student assignments involved copying out the music of Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina.

However, as far as the good citizens of Augusta County are concerned (perhaps only the Republicans among them) there is a big difference between reproducing music, written or heard, a reproducing an Islamic declaration of faith. As a result of the hysteria stirred up by Trump, one by think that citizens were afraid that mere exposure to a significant element of that faith (one might compare it to the representation of the cross in Christianity) might turn their children into terrorists. Sober-minded students of the life and practices of Adolf Hitler know that creating a mass feeling of fear is often the key to winning popular support; and Augusta County seems to provided a powerful data point in support of this proposition. Indeed, according to the report on the Al Jazeera Web site, the school decided to close early for the Christmas break after receiving threats of violence.

Perhaps we should credit Trump for knowing more about Islamic terrorist strategies than we might have guessed, since there seems to be a clear parallel in his strategy for winning the American public to his cause.

It Has Come to This

In her opening news summary this morning on her radio broadcast of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman introduced one of her stories with the phrase "In the latest mass shootings across the United States …." Beyond the Fringe used to have a joke about how, during the Second World War, every evening the BBC would bring "news of fresh disasters." That was funny back at a time when we did not take "fresh disasters" to be part of the stream of everyday life. Now they are; and, while Goodman was anything but casual in her reporting, her phrasing suggested that news of a mass shooting had become about as familiar as news of a hurricane striking. Perhaps we have to be casual about these things because the volume of taking all of them seriously would be unbearable.

Speaking Truth to Power is no Guarantee that Power will Comprehend

This past Tuesday James Gleick put up a fascinating post on the NYR Daily blog. His title was "What Libraries Can (Still) Do;" and it amounted to a valuable analysis of how the resource of a public library could be qualitatively different from that of a computer connected to the Internet, emphasizing the positive value of that difference. He then signed off with a zinger of a punch line:

The masters of Internet commerce—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple—sometimes talk as though they’re building a new society, where knowledge is light-speed and fungible, but a marketplace is not a society.

This allowed him to hit squarely on the head a nail in desperate need of being hit. Unfortunately, that desperation has a lot to do with the prevailing ignorance among those "masters of Internet commerce." We have known for some time that the movers and shakers in the world of the Internet have been blithely ignorant of the social world. Many of them might even attribute their success to that ignorance. The bottom line is that they are so fixated on the marketplace that they believe that the very concept of society is outmoded, if not downright counterproductive. Thus, whenever social disruption rears its head, whether it involves death threats, identity theft, or just plain harassment, the "masters of Internet commerce" turn a blind eye and hold to their faith that the workings of the marketplace will take care of everything. Unfortunately, the result goes beyond the disappearance of society (and, along with it, any viable sense of the concept of governance) from the Internet. Because the Internet is so ubiquitous, society no longer signifies in the world at large except among terrorist groups for whom cultures that have neglected both society and governance can now be recognized as easy targets.

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

Rage Against the Technology

Those who get high on the Kool-Aid of disruptive technologies are usually too stoned to realize that, if not properly managed, disruption can result in an eruption of violence. This is what happened when 2800 Parisian taxi drivers went on strike to protest against UberPop. As one can read in Hugo Leenhardt's report for ABC News, things got really ugly; and, as is usually the case in war, the ugliness infected both sides. So, while Uber cars were vandalized, it appears that one Uber driver decided to deal with a cabbie blocking his way by running over the guy. What makes things all the more depressing is that the French government had already declared UberPop to be illegal, banned due to unfair competitive practices. As a result Paris has discovered something that any American city with a plethora of bike riders aggressively competing with motorists on city streets has known all along: A practice is only illegal if legality is sustained through enforcement. Clearly, such enforcement did not not take place "with all deliberate speed" in Paris. This led to the usual problem with vigilante justice: offended parties taking the law into their own hands, usually with violent results.

It is unclear that there is a way out of this mess. The fact is that technology evangelists have managed to disrupt the world of governance while pursuing an agenda that seems to have involved disrupting the world of work. The primary consequence is that all of us are living in a world in which goods are more likely to be defective and services are less likely to be reliable. It is hard to imagine our arriving at a closer approximation to the apocalyptic world that E. M. Forster envisaged in "The Machine Stops." Unfortunately, one of the services that has been disrupted beyond recognition is education. Thus, while in Forster's world people just got more tolerant of an increasing number of flaws, we now seem to be creating a new generation too stupid to realize that those flaws even exist.

When a Change for the Better Makes Things Worse

Today's Al Jazeera English Web site has an article by Dinouk Colombage about the formation of an orchestra of Sinhalese and Tamil children recently formed in Sri Lanka. Since the participating children are poor, the Venezuelan "El Sistema" was cited as a precedent. However, the title of the article was "Can music lead to social harmony in Sri Lanka?," suggesting that trying to ease tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil cultures was also a major issue. In that respect a more appropriate precedent might be Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was formed to provide an opportunity for musicians of both Arab and Israeli backgrounds to come together for the sake of making music. (It should be noted for the record that this ensemble is based in Seville, rather than anywhere in the Middle East.)

I have great admiration for Barenboim's project. However, it is somewhat interesting to think about what has happened on a global scale since its formation in 1999. Over the course of about fifteen years, the world has experienced a radical increase in acts of inter-cultural violence; and there is no sign of the trend reversing. (I have made it a point not to single out any particular cultures in making that observation.) This has led be to entertain the conjecture that social harmony is bad for politics. This conjecture may be approached from the opposite direction by taking Max Weber as a point of departure: Politics is all about legitimizing the exercise of power. Thus, it is only natural that it is driven by opposing blocs, each of which seeks to hold more power than the others. As a result, we can find social harmony in an orchestra because making music involves getting beyond the idea that life is all about having more power than those around you. The problem is that both the members of the orchestra and those in the audience have to go back to the real world after the concert has concluded; and we now live in a real world in which "social harmony" is treated as an impediment to political maneuvering rather than as asset for society as a whole.

Keeping the Faith No Longer

The BBC News Web site just posted an article based on a rather interesting finding:

Pew Research Center found that 71% of Americans identified as Christian in 2014 - down from 78% in 2007.

Statistically, that amounts to a pretty significant drop; and it will be interesting to see what sorts of hypotheses are launched to explain the shift. We have a long history of viewing our country as a secular one dedicated to the separation of church and state. However, in this new century fundamentalist Christianity seems to be playing a greater role in politics. Thus, it may be that those who previously embraced Christianity are put off by extremist fringes, possibly even seeing little difference between them and Jewish or Muslim extremists. In other words, where the fellowship of Christianity once provided a "quiet place" where an individual could take stock of his/her values within a sympathetic community, that "place" has now become unduly "noisy," meaning that, as a "social world" it is not that different from Facebook or Twitter. I have been living comfortably with my own atheism for over 40 years, so I am probably not the best source of hypotheses. Still, I have to wonder if this is yet another case of "voting against," rather than "voting for," in which case it may be a sign of an increasing loss of any value system, secular or sacred.

Rationality Does Not Trump Hatred

There is something disconcerting about self-righteous reactions to hatred at its most brutal. Whether it involves desecrating ancient monuments, kidnapping and killing students, or protesting vigorously against the Affordable Care Act for no other reason than not being able to stand the idea of a black President, those who act out of hatred have no interest in listening to reason. Indeed, they are lashing out against conditions that they believe are products of rationality that have done them no good whatsoever, either because they really believe this or they are conditioned to believe it by those skilled in the consciousness industry. Cool heads do not prevail. Even Jesus discovered that. In our efforts to make the world a better place, we have dug ourselves into a very deep hole. Unfortunately, digging is all we seem to know how to do, meaning that the hole will only get deeper.

Ignorance of History Strikes Again

Given our country's track record of dealing with apocalyptic Christian extremist cults, particularly on our own soil, our failure to understand what Malise Ruthven called the "Lure of the Caliphate" on her recent NYRBlog post and the power it exerts in both pursuing its vision and recruiting others for assistance is nothing short of catastrophic myopia.

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?

The Latest Round of Ignoring History

Last week the Facts & Arts Web site ran, "A Greek Morality Tale," an analysis by Joseph E. Stiglitz of the damaging effects of austerity that was almost painful to read. Unfortunately, much of the pain came from the conclusion:

One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail.

Ironically, the leading beneficiary of the sort of judgment that Stiglitz counsels is Germany, through the planned recovery it experienced following the Second World War. Unfortunately, Germany is now the leading "austerity hawk."

Actually, Stieglitz himself does not take Germany to task. Rather, he lays the blame on what he calls the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These are all institutions of the rich and mighty getting richer and mightier than they are in narrowing that enormous gulf between extreme wealthy and abject poverty. In such organizations "humane values" are no longer part of the mindset. The days when the filthy rich could cleanse their souls, so to speak, through philanthropy are long gone; and no one of any import seems to regret their passing.

Meanwhile unemployment has reached crisis proportions in just about every corner of the world. As I wrote back in 2011, this has become the age of "youth without future," brought upon by those whose incessant fixation with the immediacy of the "bottom line" has led to a willful ignorance of history. Is it any wonder that such youth, feeling abandoned by those who should know better, are attracted to the lure of extremists, most of whom can only be counted upon to make matters worse?

Mozart the Islamic Terrorist?

According to an article on the Web site of the London Telegraph:

Speculation is rife that Isis, Lord Grantham’s yellow Labrador in the ITV period soap-opera [Downton Abbey, for those who need to be told], may be on the verge of being killed off, as programme bosses scramble to avoid any association with the terrorist group.

Julian Fellowes, who created the series, claims that any comment on the plot would be a "slope," by which I assume he means "slippery slope." However, things are already slipping pretty badly if we are to judge by another sentence in the Telegraph article:

Isis Martinez, a woman from Florida, started a global petition urging the media to “stop calling the terrorists by our name”, while an Australian construction firm urged staff not to wear uniforms, and Isis Equity Partners recently announced plans for a re-brand.

I guess we shall known when we have slipped into the gutter when a call goes out to change Sarastro's aria at the beginning of the second act of The Magic Flute.

Moral Indignation is like Teaching a Pig to Sing

My favorite Mark Twain quote is:

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of time, and it annoys the pig.

Facts & Arts ran a reprint of a statement issued by Human Rights Watch Director Bill Frelick on the subject of ISIS. His title was:

Why ISIS is immune to 'naming and shaming'

He makes his case well but then concludes with the sentence:

And even if the perpetrators are beyond shaming, the moral imperative to name names has never been greater.

The question, however, is who is either served or damaged by such a moral imperative. ISIS seems to be taking their playbook from the Nazis, who, in turn got it from Friederich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche's words, they see themselves as "beyond good and evil," at least as those concepts are defined by those they oppose. As a result, having one's name named may actually be treated as a badge of honor, recognition of "a job well done," if you please. The effect is the same as annoying the pig. The real question is how one can respond to such actions without losing one's own moral compass; and, since we now seem to be at the mercy of governmental systems that no longer have such a moral compass, my guess is that we shall never see anything more than dithering jawboning.

On the Tourism of Suffering

One of the things I liked most about April Bernard's latest post to NYRBlog ("Caged Laughter") is that the "entertainment factor" that has made Orange Is the New Black such a success "turns the viewer into a tourist of suffering." I view this as a justifiably sharp choice of words, and I say this because I found myself using even sharper language for comparable situations in the past. Specifically, I have referred to the appeal of the photographs of Dorothea Lange as "Disadvantage Pornography" and the documentaries of Dan Brown providing in-depth analysis of terrorist acts as "Terror Pornography." Mind you, there is nothing new about any of these genres or their pornographic power. In many respects that power can be traced back to the literature (if we may use that term) of the Marquis de Sade, whose primary (if not only) intention was to induce arousal in the reader (not to mention to author). I am not saying that either Lange or Brown did what they did out of some perverted sense of self-indulgence. I am saying that, as consumers, we are more likely to derive a certain prurient pleasure from the work, perhaps because it diverts us from thinking about the issues that those creators really wanted us to consider.

Terrorism by the Book of Edgar Allan Poe

Yesterday's Taliban attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, was, without a doubt, a major news story, significant enough that it is still reverberating. Having now gone through several reports, I still find that the Al Jazeera English article, which takes wire service material and adds their own "local knowledge" sources, makes for one of the best accounts. Perhaps one of the reasons that my attention was drawn to their treatment was that it reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and the futility of that tale's protagonist to insulate himself and his closest friends from the ravages of a plague.

It struck me that both the Lebanese restaurant and the Wazir Akbar Khan district where it was located made for a setting with that same kind of insulation in mind. Those being insulated were the rich and mighty, foreigners and Afghans alike. Consider this sentence in the Al Jazeera report about the Taverna du Liban:

It has steel doors and customers have to pass through security to get in, as is the case with many restaurants in the city.

Consider, now, this sentence from the statement given by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid:

There was a suicide attack on a foreign hotel where special foreign invaders are coming for dinner.

We may choose to debate whether or not that noun "invaders" is appropriate; but no such debate is necessary in the eyes of the Taliban.

This is yet another case in which it would be folly to deny that the attacker has a point of view. The use of that noun clearly indicates a point of view that foreigners are exploiting Afghan resources with the collusion of other Afghans getting rich in the process. This is an effort to fight back against the invasion and driver out the invaders. The only problem is that history tells us what happened the last time the Taliban succeeded in this mission.

All this took place just as Prince Prospero's most favored guests were preparing for the relocation of his fortified castle to Davos. My guess is that the Taliban will be given a generous amount of lip service. It is unlikely, however, that they will receive any other kind of attention from the World Economic Forum. This would make the Taliban the reductio ad absurdum of the activism of the impoverished. Someone should start wondering whether or not such bloodthirsty absurdity is really the only way to deal with the unabated growth of poverty around the world.

Profiles in Cowardice

This past Wednesday, Gary Wills put up a particularly caustic post on NYRBlog entitle "Back Door Secession." By taking a historical point of view, he could compare current TEA Party activities, which I have previously called "politics by terrorism," to those of the secessionists in Congress prior to secession itself and the Civil War that followed. His point was that, in both cases, an extremist minority could hold the more moderate majority in check. He further claimed that the minority had such power because of the cowardice of the majority.

I think he has a good point, but it is not a particularly novel one. Politics is not about governance. It is about acquiring and keeping power, and that is not achieved through courageous acts. That is that made John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage book so interesting (and, at the time, so inspiring). We cannot expect any elected official, regardless of position, to be anything other than an abject coward. After all, if "get elected" is the most important rule of politics, the second most important rule is "stay elected." When that is all that matter, the office-holder will yield meekly to all sorts of threatening situations.

From the String Quartet to Representative Government

I just finished reading a fascinating reprint from Administrative Science Quarterly that basically examined the behavior of a string quartet as a model for an "intense work group" (the sort of group that might, for example, be involved in making high-level policy decisions for a large organization). The paper ended with the requisite "lessons learned" section, suggesting that such work groups did, indeed, have something to learn from the work practices of string quartets (at least the successful ones). The sentence that really stuck with me from this section of the paper was the following:

When facing conflict, groups might (a) leave hot topics alone to give everyone a chance to cool off (Pruitt, 1981; Ury, Brett, and Goldberg, 1988); (b) never settle for majority rule which, at a minimum, engenders minority dissatisfaction; and (c) know each other well enough to know what can't be said, i.e., ignore unavoidable dissimilarities and let policies evolve without raising issues explicitly.

One of the key conclusions was the conflict was inevitable. However, good string quartets accept that inevitability as axiomatic and, as a result, are more interested in getting on with making music than with trying to resolve those conflicts.

It is hard to resist reading that quoted sentence without thinking of the currently crippled state of our government. After all, one of the reasons why the TEA Party has come as far as they have through what I recently called "politics by terrorism" is that their leaders appreciate the advantage of keeping hot topics as hot as possible and avoiding any efforts concerned only with cooling down the heat of the situation. Indeed, those steering the TEA Party probably know full well that their group will never assume a controlling majority but can still work the hell out of "minority dissatisfaction." Unfortunately, our President still embraces the virtues of rational efforts to resolve conflicts, not realizing that, from the very beginning, all the TEA Party ever wanted was to keep the government from "getting on with making music;" and they seem to have succeeded on an impressive scale.

Politics by Terrorism?

One of the more interesting issues raised by HBO's The Newsroom involved the decision of the news anchor character to refer to the TEA Party as the "American Taliban." This was his way of venting his disgust at the way in which a well-financed minority had succeeded in hijacking what had previously been a rather wide class of values embraced by those who called themselves Republicans. The script for The Newsroom made it clear that the financing is in the hands of a few individuals who cared little for the values of TEA Party constituents themselves but simply (and selfishly) realized that those individual would be the perfect pawns for the large game they wished to play. Indeed, as has been recently observed, the best way to get the pawns to move is to exploit their feelings of "racial resentment."

There was thus some justification to that Taliban metaphor. The implication was that power was all that matters, not only having it but also exercising it for self-interest "by any means necessary." As I write this, the shutdown of the United States Government has pretty much been written off as inevitable. However, by following this story through the BBC, I realized that such terrorist tactics were also jeopardizing basic principles of representative government on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Italy. There we have Silvio Berlusconi, convicted guilty of tax-fraud, about to bring down the current government because, regardless of his criminal status, he still maintains control over what had been the ruling coalition.

Is it any wonder that there are so many people out there struggling to make ends meet who are now doubting whether or not the public good is really being served by the principles of government itself?